Sampson Testimony May Be Key To Gonzales Flap

Friends say D. Kyle Sampson, the former chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, believes that bureaucratic bungling rather than intentional wrongdoing was at the root of controversy over replacement of eight U.S. attorneys. Officials in both parties say Sampson’s testimony this Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee could provide a crucial roadmap to what happened, with Gonzales’ credibility at stake.

After the Justice Department released e-mails on Friday night that appeared to contradict the assertion by Gonzales that he had not been “involved in any discussions” about the firings, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), a member of the committee, said on Saturday: “The Sampson testimony is now more crucial than ever. He was at the center of it all. He can tell us what the attorney general knew, when he knew it, and what he did about it.”

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Sampson’s questioners have e-mail showing that he discussed the replacement of the prosecutors with Gonzales beginning shortly after President Bush’s reelection in 2004. Sampson was also part of a meeting, documented in the e-mails released Friday, that Gonzales attended on the issue shortly before the firings occurred. He can be expected to tell Congress he was more involved in the details than Gonzales was.

Gonzales is scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on April 17, at a regular Justice Department oversight hearing that is likely to include an inspector general's critical report about the FBI's use of national security letters.

Sampson is not gunning for anybody, according to friends. He believes that the issue has blown up because the Justice Department had an inadequate system for preparing officials to testify before Congress, the friends say. The Justice Department officials testified that the firings were based on performance rather than politics, an assertion called into question by e-mails the department later delivered to Capitol Hill.

The friends say Sampson, 37, does not plan to deliver bombshells, and say that Democrats looking for plots and schemes will be disappointed. Like other Republicans, Sampson will contend there was no underlying sin, just a botched response.

“He is not personally of the opinion now, based on what he knows, that anybody at the Department of Justice did anything intentionally wrong,” said a friend familiar with Sampson’s thinking.

Sampson is testifying voluntarily, sparing the committee from having to decide whether to subpoena him. “He doesn’t feel that he has anything to hide,” the friend said. “He doesn’t feel that there’s any aspect of this story that he can’t explain publicly. He’s hoping to contribute what he knows in the hope that getting the truth out, as fully as it can be gotten out, will ultimately help calm the situation rather than aggravate it.”

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that Sampson "is right in the middle of it." Leahy said he would have subpoenaed Sampson “if he didn’t come voluntarily,” and said he worried that some are “trying to make him the fall guy.”

The Senate committee has authorized but not issued subpoenas for current and former White House aides to testify about the U.S. attorney firings. However, the White House remains adamant in refusing to allow aides to offer any public testimony. At a White House briefing Monday afternoon, Deputy Press Secretary Dana Perino said she knew of no plans for compromise on the issue, saying administration aides would only talk behind closed doors and without a transcript.

"This is not a hearing or an interrogation, and in order to avoid the appearance of that, we offered the interview," she said. "We're not going to have a transcript."

The e-mails released by the Justice Department last week show Sampson was acutely aware of the politics of the replacements: He realized that Karl Rove, Bush’s senior adviser, was interested in the moves, and Sampson warned that they could draw heat. He added: “That said, if Karl thinks there is the political will to do it, then so do I.”

The title of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s 10 a.m. hearing this Thursday hints at the tone Sampson can expect to confront: “Preserving Prosecutorial Independence: Is the Department of Justice Politicizing the Hiring and Firing of U.S. Attorneys?–Part III.” Sampson is not doing any pre-interview with committee staff, but will just show up and testify.

Sampson had also served as counselor to Gonzales’ predecessor, John Ashcroft, and was an associate White House counsel when Gonzales headed the office. The Judiciary Committee will be familiar turf, as well, because he was committee counsel to Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) from 1999 to 2001 before moving into the administration.

Sampson—a Utah native and father of three whose wife is a fellow graduate of Brigham Young University—is the bishop of his Northern Virginia ward of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. He told BYU Magazine in 2003, when he was in the White House counsel’s office, that he often got home just in time to read to the children before bed. “There is a small moment in time when I can engage in this sort of public service,” Sampson said. “I know it will come to an end, so that makes the long hours worthwhile.”

Sampson resigned March 12 after he was named in news articles as the point person on the firings, and plans to tell committee members about the sequence of events leading to his resignation. Friends say he left the department voluntarily and was not pushed out. He remained there on March 13, with Gonzales saying at a news conference, “He is still at the department as he transitions out and looks for other employment.” Sampson was gone the next day.

At the news conference, Gonzales said Sampson “was charged with directing the process.” The attorney general said that Sampson had also been responsible for the U.S. attorneys when they worked together at the White House. “So naturally when questions came up with respect to the evaluation of performances of U.S. attorneys, it would be Kyle Sampson who would drive that effort,” Gonzales said.

The attorney general noted that in a department with 110,000 employees, “Obviously there are going to be decisions that I’m not aware of in real time. Many decisions are delegated.” He said he “was not involved in any discussions of what was going on.”

However, e-mail released Friday night showed that Gonzales attended a meeting about the dismissals of the Republican U.S. attorneys 10 days before they were carried out.

With many people involved in the Justice Department fiasco scrambling for cover, Sampson made it clear in a statement last week by his lawyer, Bradford A. Berenson of the law firm Sidley Austin, that he did not want to be made a scapegoat. “Kyle did not resign because he had misled anyone at the Justice Department or withheld information concerning the replacement of the U.S. attorneys,” the statement said. “He resigned because, as chief of staff, he felt he had let the attorney general down in failing to appreciate the need for and organize a more effective response to the unfounded accusations that the replacements were improper. The fact that the White House and Justice Department had been discussing this subject since the election was well-known to a number of other senior officials at the department, including others who were involved in preparing the department's testimony to Congress. … The focus of preparation efforts was on why the U.S. attorneys had been replaced, not how.”

White House and Justice Department spokespeople have contended there is no inconsistency between the e-mail and the statements Gonzales made. Republicans sympathetic to Gonzales, while not knowing what he will contend, say that one case he could make to indignant lawmakers would be that the problem lies in the difference between what he said and what he meant: When he told the Senate Judiciary Committee in January that he “would never, ever make a change in a United States attorney position for political reasons or if it would, in any way, jeopardize an ongoing serious investigation,” what he meant was that he would never fire someone for improper political reasons or to influence a case.

The Republicans say the argument would be that he was guilty of sloppy language, of being too categorical and of saying things he hadn’t thought through carefully enough.